Teen's Leap From Ship Recounted

By PAIGE HEWITT, EYDER PERALTA and MIKE TOLSON
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

COZUMEL, Mexico?- In the dim light just before dawn, long before most of the passengers aboard the Carnival cruise ship Ecstasy were awake, David Ritcheson maneuvered his way up a tower near the bow that held radar and other electronics gear.

His makeshift promontory provided a great view, but the teenager from Spring had not come for that. There was little to see but water anyway. Only one thing was on Ritcheson's mind Sunday morning after he wriggled up some cables to reach the top ?- whether to jump off.

Ecstasy's passengers said Monday after docking here that security staff tried to coax Ritcheson down. So did one of his friends. Nobody understood the point of his ascent.

"David!" yelled one of his buddies. "What the (expletive) are you doing?"

Nobody understood. Not the horror of what he had experienced. Not the pain that he lived with. Perhaps only his final act, a leap that ended all the suffering, made any sense at all.

Ritcheson's body, mangled first by a savage assault that made national headlines and then by a 200-foot fall into the Gulf of Mexico, will make a slow final journey home and remain on board a cruise ship until it returns to Galveston on Thursday, the FBI said. There the Galveston County Medical Examiner's office will conduct an autopsy and the FBI its own investigation.


An hour of negotiations
Passengers, a few of whom saw the event but most of whom repeated what crew members told them, said Ritcheson, 18, started his climb on the front end of the ship about 6:15 a.m. Minutes later, they said, security staff began negotiating with him. Some said Ritcheson lowered himself to the deck, but after talks that lasted perhaps an hour, he decided to jump.

Passenger Rick Waffle was headed to the gym when he felt the ship shake as it came to a stop. The captain announced over the intercom that the ship was turning around for an overboard passenger. Grant Anderson, another passenger, said crew members threw flares and life preservers into the water.

About 30 minutes later, passengers saw Ritcheson's body in one of the rescue boats. The crew tried to resuscitate him to no avail, Waffle said. Later the captain announced that the person overboard had died.

By appearances, Ritcheson was regaining control over his life following a brutal, racist assault in April 2006 that almost claimed it. Most of the surgeries required to repair extensive internal injuries had been done. He had stepped forward at the cost of public embarrassment to testify before Congress in support of expanded hate crimes legislation. He had returned to school, reconnected with his friends and started to live as a regular high school student, albeit one with significant scars, physical and emotional.

On the outside, friends said, Ritcheson appeared to be his same smiling self.

And if he was upset, said Jenny Bonilla, a friend and fellow student at Klein Collins High School, "he never showed it in any way."

The Harris County prosecutor who secured convictions and lengthy prison sentences for the two teenagers who attacked him saw no evidence of problems beneath the surface.

"All of us thought he had turned a corner and was trying to make something positive out of what had happened to him," Mike Trent said.

Ritcheson, interviewed by the Houston Chronicle in April, said he recognized that he was lucky to be alive and had gotten through the worst of his ordeal. He talked about going to college. As for memories of the attack itself, he said he coped by "not thinking about it."


Rebuffed counseling
Trent said he last saw Ritcheson in January. He spoke with his parents in recent weeks and heard nothing discouraging.

"But every day, David had pain he lived with, and there were things he could no longer do as a result of his injuries," Trent said. "And there were scars that were very disfiguring. All I know is, when you're 18 years old, it's very hard to see beyond tomorrow or even beyond today."

Ritcheson had rebuffed all suggestions that he get psychological counseling and wouldn't even talk to friends about it. Mental health experts say his avoidance of professional help is common for victims of trauma ?- and dangerous.

"It's not uncommon that (trauma victims) would feel suicidal, and not uncommon they would not want or seek help," said Dr. John Sargent, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and director of child psychiatry at Ben Taub Hospital. "It's very common that men who have experienced sexual abuse are quiet about it and work to keep it out of their minds."

But the mind often has other ideas. Feelings of weakness and helplessness are often accompanied by those of isolation. Emotions become hard to control.

"The younger and less educated, the more at risk you are," said Dan Creson, a retired psychiatry professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston and a national expert in post-traumatic stress disorders. "When he originally took the position that he didn't want treatment, that's going to leave him vulnerable. ... Suicide is often an impulsive thing. And there's often a lot of anger, a screw-the-world sort of feeling."


Students grieve
With school out for the summer, Ritcheson's classmates turned to the Internet to memorialize the former football player and homecoming king.

The headlines on their MySpace pages read like tombstones. "R.I.P. David," or "D-Ritch." Bonilla placed the words between hearts. She met Ritcheson through her boyfriend last September.

"David was an amazing person," she wrote in an e-mail, too emotional to talk on the phone. "He was homecoming king this year. He had a great heart."

In Ritcheson's honor, she urged her classmates, through an online message, to be strong.

"Many of us know him as that kid that got beaten severely and got sexually assaulted but he didn't want to be known for that," she wrote. "He was David Ritcheson. Just a normal kid like us. No different than me or you. He just had more problems than us."

To Ritcheson she wrote: "Keep watching over us."

Ritcheson's parents traveled to Mexico today and are expected to board the cruise ship at an undisclosed port this afternoon so they can see their son's body, said Carlos Leon, the family's attorney.

The parents will stay on board for the remainder of the cruise and will return with all other passengers to Galveston on Thursday. Ritcheson's body will then be moved to the Galveston County Medical Examiner's Office, where an autopsy will be performed, Leon said.

The FBI will assume the lead role in the investigation into Ritcheson's death.

Ritcheson had paid for the cruise trip himself, joining two friends and one of the young men's parents on the vessel. They remain on the cruise ship and are expected to speak with Ritcheson's parents when they board the ship today, Leon said.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been made, the attorney said.

Chronicle reporters Steve McVicker, Ericka Mellon and Peggy O'Hare contributed to this report.